I understand that being on the internet, I will be subjected to a certain amount of spam. I'm okay with that. But, this year, the Valentine's Day barrage of email is getting quite insane. In one day, I've received six emails from the same location telling me of a dozen roses and chocolates for only $39.95. I only have three email addresses that I currently check, so that's an average of two messages per email address from one company in one day.

It's not so much the spam itself that bothers me, as the fact that it's blind. These people really know nothing about me, and keep trying to sell me things that I don't need. I'd love to be able to send a place information about myself, and have email advertisers be able to use that information to get rid of certain ads (and of course, add others, but at least ones I have a chance of being interested in...)

"Oh, he's 5'8" and 115lbs. Maybe we should stop sending him "Lose Weight: Guaranteed!" ads..."Hmmm...He's told us that he has no one romantic in his life right now. Let's not send him 30 flowers for your wife ads today."

I'd be perfectly willing to give out more information about myself, if it prevented these ads that bear no relation on me from showing up...

Yeah, spam is WAY up lately...I can download 12 messages and have 10 of them be spams. EBay is probably the source of at least some of mine...until they changed their set-up, you used to be able to log into eBay with your account name and be able to see the registered e-mail address of all the other users. (Now you can only see e-mail addresses of people you're in a transaction with.)

Of course, Amazon has probably sold my e-mail address all over the place, too.

And some, like you said, are just sent out blindly. I once got a spam that the spammer set up incorrectly...he put all the e-mail addresses he was sending the spam to in the CC field, rather than the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field, so I a whole list of "mikester@" various domains. Wouldn't that result in a ton of bounced messages? Of course, all the bounced messages would probably be going to a fake domain anyway, so they're all just floating around in the air, somewhere. :)